Qt 4.7 for the N900 news

It’s vacation time in Finland, which means less emails, which means more time for blogging

First, we’re happy to report that Qt 4.7 for a potential future Maemo 5 update (*) is progressing nicely. Next to dozens of Maemo 5 specific bug fixes, we’re also happy to announce that a few new features for Maemo 5 have entered 4.7-fremantle. Since the N900 doesn’t support multiple touch input, QGesture support was off by default in Qt 4.6. For Qt 4.7, we managed to add support for single touch gestures, like tap and tap-and-hold, which makes touch-friendly UIs friendlier to write. Users of Qt Mobility’s Bearer Management should be happy to know that Qt’s internal auto-connect-when-offline mechanism can be entirely disabled via QMaemoInternetConnectivity::setAutoConnectEnabled(). And on top of that, the new 4.7 features also run nicely on the N900, most notably QtDeclarative.

Qt 4.7 experimental packages can be found in Maemo’s extras-devel repository. Scratchbox SDK users can install them by running fakeroot apt-get install libqt4-experimental-dev.

Experimental support for the experimental Qt 4.7 packages for the experimental MADDE (0.6.84) environment (as shipped with the Qt Nokia SDK) can be found here. Check the README for installation instructions.

We’d like to ask all of our Qt 4.6 users to give Qt 4.7 a try. All bugs can be reported as always at bugreports.qt.nokia.com. Happy development

(*) “potential” means it might or might not happen and we have no clue if and when